A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple NumbersPaperback, 1 July 2005

How can some people come to believe that their poodle is an impostor? Or see colors in numbers? Internationally acclaimed neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran now shares his unique insight into human consciousness in an entertaining, inspiring, and intellectually dazzling brief tour of the ultimate frontier--the thoughts in our heads.

A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness is made up of five investigations of the greatest mysteries of the brain, including:

-how amputees feel pain in limbs they no longer have, which introduces the great revolution of our age: neuroscience
-the way what we see determines our thoughts, and the counterintuitive point that believing is in fact seeing
-why, the world over, cultures have fundamentally similar notions of what is attractive
-the bizarre world of synesthetes, people who see colors in numbers, textures in smells, sounds in sights, and flavors in sounds
-the implications of the revolution in our understanding of consciousness, to make a fascinating argument about our essential sense of self and its distributed nature